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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Accessibility of Charts
The second EHR benefit is similar to the Legibility of Notes benefit in that it is easily forgotten as a benefit to EHR and it can be hard to quantify the value of the benefit in dollar amounts. Plus, it is really easy to see how nice accessible charts are to an organization.

There are a number of ways to look at the EHR benefit of accessible charts. The most obvious one is when you think about the number of times a chart has gone missing in a clinic. In most cases, the chart isn’t really missing. It’s in the clinic somewhere, but no one can find it. Remember all those special places that a chart could hide: exam room, physician’s desk, front desk, nurse’s desk, lab sign off box, physician’s car, hospital, physician’s home, etc etc etc. Oh yes, I didn’t even mention HIM not being able to find the chart because someone (probably someone other than HIM) misfiled the paper chart.

I’m sure most HIM people who read this will have a visceral reaction. I’m sure many are likely thinking, “But we do an amazing job keeping track of all those paper charts.” I agree with them 100%. A good HIM person has done an amazing job keeping track of paper charts. It would be 100 times worse if they weren’t there. The problem is that if a dozen people are using the paper chart, the reality is that charts are going to go missing.

Now think about the concept when it comes to EHR. None of those lost chart locations exist. The nurse can’t accidentally take the chart and forget to file it. The doctor can’t forget the chart at home or in his car. No one can misfile the chart.

Think about it. An EHR solves 100% of the problem of missing paper charts.

Besides misplaced paper charts, the idea of chart accessibility is an important one when you consider the idea of accessing an EHR remotely. Even if you use a less than ideal remote desktop solution, a physician can access an EHR anywhere they have an internet connection. For web based EHR, you get exactly the same experience accessing the EHR remotely as you would in the office.

I’ve heard horror stories (at least their pretty horrible to me) of doctors getting late night patient calls which require them to get dressed, go into the office, open the medical records room to access a patient chart. With an EHR, that same workflow has the doctor booting his computer and logging into the EHR. This doesn’t apply to all doctors, but for those that do it’s a dramatic difference.

The biggest fear I’ve heard from doctors in this regard is they often equate chart accessibility with their accessibility. The argument goes that if they can access the chart 24/7, that it also means they have to work 24/7. I think this is a myth that doesn’t match most realities. Just because you had a key to your office and could go and work on paper charts 24/7 doesn’t mean you had to do it. The same is true with remote access to EHR. You choose when is appropriate and important to access and work on the EHR and when not to do so.

The key difference between EHR and paper charts is that when you do want to access a patient’s record remotely you have that option available to you. That doesn’t mean you always have to do so, but it is nice to have that option available.

When talking about EHR accessibility, I think also about the landscape of connected mobile devices (smart phones, tablets, etc). All of these devices are connected to the internet at all times and could provide a doctor access to their EHR almost anywhere in the world. Try doing that with paper.

The problem here is that most EHR don’t do well on mobile devices. Remote desktop from a smart phone or tablet works, but is a pretty terrible user experience. A native mobile app provides a much better experience for users, but we’re still in the early days of EHR mobile app development. As this matures, the accessibility of charts will become an even bigger EHR benefit.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

One of the all time favorite topics of discussion here at EMR and HIPAA is around SaaS EHR software versus client server EHR software. They each go by many other names and the technical among us might know the hard core technical difference between each, but most doctors don’t know and don’t care. SaaS EHR software is often called hosted EHR software or ASP EHR software or even Cloud Computing if you want to use a general term. Client Server EHR software is sometimes called in house EHR software or self hosted EHR software. I’m sure there are other names I missed.

Regardless of what you call it, many people (usually those from SaaS software vendors) believe that client server software will lose out to the cloud. It’s hard to argue with them since in almost every other industry cloud based software has won.

Here’s why I don’t think we’re going to spell the death of client server software for a long time to come. Client server is going to be here for a long time because of such wide adoption by so many doctors. Not to mention, many of the client server EHR systems are really large implementations that would be hard to displace. Plus, there are many doctors who don’t care about the mobile benefits of a SaaS based EHR software. Quite a few doctors want to only use their EHR software in their office.

Certainly there are others on a client server based EHR system which will want to access their EHR outside of their office. Unfortunately, instead of EHR replacement we’re likely to see a hybrid environment that supports client server and some sort of app environment come out of the various client server EHR vendors.

Sure, a lot of doctors will also use Citrix or other remote desktop environments and hate the user experience, but it will pacify them until the hybrid EHR environment is built. In fact, that hate towards the remote desktop environment on a mobile device will drive the development of this hybrid approach. The advantages of a client server environment with an app connection will keep the client server environment around for a while.

So, while many want to declare the death to client server, I’m not ready to do so. Sure, SaaS EHR software has its advantages, but client server software isn’t going to go down without a fight and they’re going to be around for a while since in many cases they hold the high ground.

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